In the Service of the Truth

Remembering Barbara Macdonald*

Lise Weil

Look Me in the Eye cover On June 15, 2000, lesbian feminist writer and activist Barbara Macdonald died at the age of 86. Those of us who read her words or heard her speak could never see old age or aging in the same way again. Though her name may not be known to young feminists, I like to think that decades from now they will be living lives demonstrably freer thanks to her legacy.

It may be hard now to think back to the shock value of Barbara's face on the cover of Look Me in the Eye: Old Women, Aging and Ageism—the direct lesbian look, without apology, the white hair and the deeply wrinkled face not softened by the camera lens. You could almost believe you had never seen an old woman before. And that of course was Barbara's message.

Barbara embraced the word "old." She rejected the terms "older woman" and "elder" not only as the euphemisms they obviously are, but because both assume youth as the measure. She saw our avoidance of "old" as the clearest sign of our shame around aging and she understood that shame as political, an internalization of our culture's message that "old is ugly, old is powerless, old is the end, and therefore that old is what no one could possibly want to be." ¹

Barbara was the first to identify ageism as a central feminist issue. She was the first to point out that young women's alienation from old women, their dread of becoming them, their revulsion towards old women's bodies, is the direct result of a sexist consumer society that glorifies youth and disempowers the old. "Your power as a younger woman," she wrote, "is measured by the distance you can keep between you and older women."²

Ageism disempowers all women, Barbara showed us, not only by dividing young from old, but also, as the youth threshold for women keeps being lowered, by instilling the dread of age earlier and earlier in women's lives. The only way to eradicate that dread, she saw, is to remove the stigma of age at the extreme end.

Barbara embraced the reality of old along with the word. She wrote about the experience of aging, from inside her lesbian body, as no one had ever written about it before. Even as she rejected the "medical model" of aging, whereby old women are seen only in terms of their physical limitations, she was committed to tracking her body's losses—joint pain, cataracts, sagging flesh—and along with them her own internalized ageism:

...Sometimes lately, holding my arms up reading in bed or lying with my arms clasped around my lover's neck, I see my arm with the skin hanging loosely from the forearm and cannot believe that it is really my own. It seems disconnected from me; it is someone else's, it is the arm of an old woman. It is the arm of such old women as I myself have seen, sitting on benches in the sun with their hands folded in their laps; old women I have turned away from. I wonder now, how and when these arms I see came to be my own—arms I cannot turn away from. ³

But she also charted the highs. Her body was taking her on a journey, and for the most part she found it exhilarating just to be along for the ride. She was fascinated by the perspective on her life that was opening up to her. "In so many ways," she wrote, "growing old contradicts the stereotype of bent over. It is a time in life for raising your head and for looking around at the view from the top of the hill, a view you have never seen. From here, guided by the landmarks, I can understand my life, because I can locate my life in history for the first time." ⁴

I first got to know Barbara twenty years ago when I joined a feminist writers group in Boston. She was the oldest in the group by at least twenty years, and as I was soon to learn (she was at that time writing the essays that would be collected in Look Me in the Eye) she was always the oldest woman wherever she went. The absence of old women in our feminist and lesbian communities-and the invisibility of old women worldwide—was a political fact she was just then beginning to take in and was to devote the rest of her life to fighting.

Fresh out of graduate school as I was I had never known a thinker like Barbara. Ideas were never abstract for her; every thought she had was grounded in material reality, body and heart always fully engaged with mind. To this day I've never known anyone whose political vision was so keen and clear.

I learned in that writing group that Barbara was not afraid to make herself unpopular, not afraid to stay silent as praise was lavished on a piece, despite the anxious heads that kept turning her way, not afraid to weigh in, once the rest of us had had our say, with her own lacerating if always perceptive critique—generally to the effect that the writer had not gone deep enough, far enough, into her own truth. But maybe I'm wrong to say Barbara was not afraid. Since we all knew that she had put herself through college by stunt parachute-jumping, it was easy to assume that daring came naturally to her. But she also admitted she was terrified at those plunges through the air; she got through them because they had to be gotten through. I believe it was in the same spirit she offered those critiques, and would go on to write articles and to give speeches which often offended and even infuriated women she wanted as allies and as friends. She said what she felt had to be said—in the service of truth.

One truth Barbara was to see and to name over and over again was the exploitation of old women by younger women. She saw it in the young lesbians who came to old lesbians wanting oral histories or material for their theses, while entirely indifferent to their lives in the present. She saw it in the young social workers and gerontologists competing for what she called "a piece of the new expertise of `old’" and in the young and midlife filmmakers and anthologists who rushed off to study old women, film them, describe them—often in patronizing and stereotyping terms—before they'd had a chance to define themselves as a political force.

What's more, Barbara saw exactly where this exploitation came from. Her analysis of family as the source of ageism is one of her most important contributions to feminist thought. In the patriarchal family, mother is defined as the servant to youth. By extension, old women are mothers to us all, there to serve everyone. (The fact that so many old women cling to this role as a shelter from the disgust and hatred that would otherwise be directed towards them makes it no less oppressive.) "Let me say it clearly," Barbara declared, "we are not your grandmothers, your mothers, your aunts." ⁵ It's only by shedding these family roles, she insisted, that old and young can begin to build relationships of integrity and equality.

Having been a social worker for most of her adult life, Barbara knew firsthand that the system of social services is not there to solve the root problems of a sexist and racist society. In her keynote speech at the National Lesbian Conference in Atlanta in 1992, she asked of the new wave of young helping professionals, many of them lesbians, "How does your certification in an academic system that has been covering up the political realities of women's lives for years qualify you as experts in our community?" ⁶ Only too presciently she warned us that the growing professionalization and therapizing of our movement, in substituting psychological for political analysis, was depoliticizing our issues and dismantling feminism.

Look Me in the Eye, which included essays by Barbara's partner Cynthia Rich, appeared in 1983. A groundbreaking book, it was reissued in 1991 in an expanded edition, has been widely anthologized for Women's Studies courses, was translated into Japanese in 1995, and inspired the formation of OLOC (Old Lesbians Organizing for Change), a national organization seeking to end ageism. A slender volume, Look Me in the Eye represents an intense distillation of thought and experience. Every essay in the collection is finely honed, and each one deserves to be read several times over.

Still, measured in published pages, Barbara's literary output was modest. Some of her finest speeches never made their way into print, and many of her best speeches and articles were never collected in a book. No doubt this is in part because, as I came to know well during the years I was editor of Trivia, Barbara was a perfectionist of the first order—stubbornly committed to "getting it right." More than once she withdrew an article we were about to publish because she felt she hadn't thought the issues through far enough. If she held the women in our writers group to a high standard, she was ruthless with herself.

But it's also true that an enormous amount of Barbara's energy in the last decade of her life went into unseen troubleshooting. This was a not a role she sought out. She was forced into it by the ongoing evidence of blatant ageism in the feminist community. She wrote to feminist editors, philosophers, filmmakers, human rights activists, insisting that they take responsibility for their objectifying, their patronizing, or their simple omission of old women. Though her tone was always respectful and her criticism constructive, she was understandably exasperated. Having put out her analysis of ageism as clearly and forcefully as she could, Barbara expected feminists at the very least to get it, if not to act on it. It was discouraging to her that they seemed to have done neither.

Barbara was a lone voice when she first began talking and writing about ageism and—with notable exceptions like the women of OLOC and Baba Copper ⁷ —it seems she was a lone voice to the end. Even as its exploitation by commercial interests intensifies, I don't hear much talk among women today about ageism—that it permeates all our interactions and our organizations, that it's usually so ingrained we don't see it, and that it's a feminist task to expose and eradicate it.

Barbara was far too suspicious of romantic cliché to accept the idea that old women have any kind of inherent wisdom. But that there is a power in old age for women she believed strongly; it was a power she defined in material terms. "For the first time in her life, an old woman can refuse society's meaningless busywork and self-betrayals and she can take charge of her own life. Such a woman won't do what she is told, she will only do what is important to her own life direction." ⁸ This was a power Barbara lived; her perceptions grew from that place of power. This is why her lectures and her writings left no one untouched.

*Reprinted from the expanded edition of Look Me in the Eye: Old Women, Aging and Ageism. Denver:Spinsters Ink Books, 2001. Now out of print. (back to essay)

Notes

"The Power of the Old Woman," Look Me in the Eye, p. 91. (back to essay)
"The Politics of Aging: I’m Not Your Mother," Ms. Magazine, July/August 1990, p. 56. (back to essay)
"Do you Remember Me," Look Me in the Eye, p. 14. (back to essay)
“From the Top of the Hill," address to National Lesbian Physicians Conference, 1989. (back to essay)
“Outside the Sisterhood: Ageism in Women’s Studies, Look Me in the Eye,” p. 124. (back to essay)
"Professionalism is Not Benign," Look Me in the Eye, p. 167. (back to essay)
Baba Copper’s work built on the essays in Look Me in the Eye. See “The View from Over the Hill: Notes on Ageism between Lesbians,” Trivia 7, summer 1985. (back to essay)
"The Power of the Old Woman," Look Me in the Eye, p. 100.

about the author

Lise Weil teaches in Goddard College’s IMA program and is currently at work on a memoir chronicling the highs and lows of late-twentieth-century feminism as she lived them.